Bill Joiner’s Leadership Agility Blog

Continued writing with occasional podcasts on Leadership Agility, the research-based book on stages of personal and leadership development. This blog captures and extends the book's key ideas; shares new insights, research, and applications from client work; and shows how Leadership Agility relates to current issues. Comments welcome! You can also follow Bill on Twitter: @leaderagility

The idea that ambivalence can be a valuable leadership resource may seem, on the face of it, like an absurd idea. But hear me out. In researching the book, Leadership Agility, I discovered that “creative agility” is a key aspect of agile leadership. Leaders with creative agility use creative thinking to transform complex, novel problems into intended results. One of the […]

In her classic book, The Change Masters, Harvard Business School Professor, Rosabeth Kanter, found that the key difference between truly innovative change leaders and those who focused only on incremental change came down to two different mindsets. The innovative leaders – those who succeeded in leading change projects that crossed boundaries and addressed formerly unseen organizational […]

When things don’t go well in organizational life, it is ever so easy to react by blaming others. For example, we may have a difficult conversation with a co-worker who seems, again, to dismiss our point of view. We wind up feeling “unheard,” frustrated, and possibly even insulted. We react (inwardly, if not outwardly) by […]

People who begin to delve into the book, Leadership Agility, are often curious about its relationship to stages of personal development (what some are now calling “vertical” development). Especially the earlier work that Bill Torbert did on the links between developmental stages and leadership. Back in the 1980s and 1990s, when Torbert did most of this work on […]

The Leadership Agility Compass is a graphic tool developed by ChangeWise, that emerged from the 5 years of intensive research and writing underlying the book, Leadership Agility. When you know how to use it, it’s a tool that can make any leadership initiative you undertake more effective. Our research on Leadership Agility found that the most effective leaders we […]

Our new book, Leadership Agility, clearly describes the inner capacities and core competencies of highly agile leaders. With over twenty real-life stories, it also identifies the five stages of levels that managers move through to master leadership agility.

Written in an engaging, down-to-earth style, this ground-breaking book is designed as a roadmap that tells you how to bring increased agility to the initiatives you take every day — whether you want to improve working relationships, develop your team, or change your organization.

This 29-page white paper tells the story of an executive team that transformed themselves and their business by learning a new approach to high-impact conversations. Provides a detailed inside view of the learning process that takes place in our Pivotal Conversations Learning Lab.

The Leadership Agility white paper is essentially an executive summary of the book. It clarifies why agility has become essential to leadership effectiveness, outlines the five levels of agility described in the book, identifies the four kinds of agility needed for successful leadership initiatives, and provides tips for becoming a more agile leader and helping others do the same.

The Leadership Agility Thought-Letter goes beyond what you'll find in the book. It provides you with applications of Leadership Agility principles and methods that you can use every day, plus updates about Leadership Agility resources.